Digital transformation, is a very hot word in the past few years, although "digital" is very hot, but want to understand the digital, know what the enterprise is turning, and how to upgrade the transformation, the core is to understand the digital opposites are. Only when you have a clear understanding of the opposite side of a thing, can you clarify the value of the thing.
In terms of "digitization", I personally understand that its opposite is "empirical".
As far as the enterprise is concerned, although there is a system for enterprise management in the past, no matter how the system is set, or how the system falls, the core is on the people, and the focus is on the middle managers. So our expectations of managers, often some of the practitioners for many years, have seen the world of people, because only more experience, see more, on some tricky things to have a more accurate judgment, encountered a big storm also know how to do to pass smoothly, which is the value of personal experience to the enterprise.
But the problem is that in the past, the business environment in the industrial era was very slow to change, so it was feasible to manage a business through human experience. But the arrival of the Internet era, especially the popularity of the mobile Internet, so that the business model of the evolution of the speed suddenly accelerated, the rise and fall of a business may be a few years of light, some of the past right experience, put today may be wrong. In particular, we are pushing the new track, new wind mouth, new blue ocean, purely by experience to do the judgment, is very difficult.
This involves a very key issue, that is, experience is good, but experience is lagging, and the Internet business model, very important to the forward-looking, this "one before and one after", reveals the difference between the two ways of thinking.
The advantage of digitization lies in the fact that data can tell us which business models are worth paying attention to and which areas can be explored. For example, the multi-dimensional analysis in big data and methods such as attribution of dissimilarities are used to give us early warning at the first sign of certain signs. Through the interpretation of data analysts, you can be the first to know whether this is an opportunity or a disaster, and not wait for the window to pass for a long time before you realize it.
But doesn't experience matter? No, experience is just as important, and digitization is not an "either/or" relationship, but one that allows companies to have the ability to do both, summarize the past through experience, and embrace the future through data.
So, we can summarize the core idea of "enterprise digitalization" as "portraying the enterprise through data and guiding the business through data". In layman's terms, it means that companies use data to understand how they are doing, where they are optimizing, and what is happening and what is going to happen to the business.
|0x01 What to do with enterprise digitization
Although the shape of the enterprise is very different, ToB, ToC, ToG, and so on, the essence of the business remains unchanged, a kind of "value increment", a kind of "cost reduction and efficiency". "The essence of the business remains the same. Therefore, through the data, we can figure out two issues: one is how our current business, this area is not room for growth, compared to the competition is not competitive, etc.; one is the data on our current business, there is no help, such as identifying high-cost and inefficient departments, or detecting the cost of spending there is no waste, etc.
Many of these are the same as those of the other two.
Of course, many companies will say, we also have a data analysis team, based on the enterprise's current ERP system to do, but this is a shallow digitalization of the work, can only be localized to improve the quality of the change. So what is the deep digital work, to see if the enterprise has a digital operating system, through the data to probe the business transformation, guide the business development, enterprise data between different institutions, business has not opened, now is not still with the situation of data silos, there is no understanding of digital talent in the management of the enterprise. The so-called "new mind to command the old body", through the data to establish a reasonable concept of development, roughly this is the meaning.
Ali's internal data culture can be summarized as follows: "with data, talk about data; no data, talk about cases; no cases, go to the research". Everyone communicates and discusses with data as much as possible, so as to ensure the scientific nature of guiding the business, rather than just guiding the future business based on one's past subjective experience.
However, the only theory of data is not right, different industries, there are different underlying principles, industry knowledge, application tools, business processes, these precipitated decades of industry experience, can not be with the emergence of data, you can go to break it, but rather think about how these experiences can be precipitated to the digital platform, and now the new technology to produce integration, in order to produce a powerful chemical effect.
For example, industrial digitization ≠ digital technology + product, but rather industrial digitization = industry + digital technology. For example, in the field of industrial manufacturing, a finished product may have dozens of manufacturing links, in the past these links are not connected to each other, so the production efficiency, yield rate, inventory rate have to be done through the human experience, so now these links can be presented in the form of data on a digital platform, we are not able to find out in real time the problems in the production process, is not it possible to Taobao and other platforms to predict future sales, so as to realize the improvement of the yield rate and the reduction of the inventory rate, at the same time?
An enterprise that does a better job of digitization is basically one that fully integrates its own application scenarios, and is able to clearly ask questions and define problems.
|0x02 Problems in the digitization process
Even if we know what digitization is and what it is trying to do, being able to get it off the ground is still not an easy task. The GAP is mainly reflected in two aspects, one is the GAP of enterprise strategy and technology products, and the other is the GAP of digitalization solutions and digitalization implementation.
Although we tend to call some of the things we talk about solutions "fooling around", in fact, to be able to make the solution clear is very important to the enterprise. It's important. Business is not an innovative business, there can be rapid trial and error opportunities, the top-level design of the enterprise is not good, a lot of work can not be carried out, and once you want to change the original program for the organization of the complexity of the enterprise, is tantamount to a "chemotherapy".
The existing enterprise digitization experience, although the current industry to obtain relatively good results, but for the new industry, is still two parallel worlds, their technology, performance, business model, etc., are not the same, so the traditional enterprises do not trust the new technology, and the new technology for traditional enterprises and the disdain of the situation.
A lot of technical experts, when speaking of their own programs, usually with three "bull" to describe themselves: how bull our company, how bull our products, how bull our cases. Regardless of who the customer is, a reason to say out, to the perception of the enterprise is one: we are the best practices, you do not have to think, do it according to the line.
Although the Internet is running fast on the road to digitization, and even many companies are digital enterprises, but we also need to see, from the C end of the digital to the B end of the process of digitization, many areas of complexity is not considered before, and a lot of professional knowledge is after decades of precipitation, we are unfamiliar with this knowledge. A simple action, for the C end of the action can be very fast, but not the B end.
Therefore, to use their own technology products, it is still necessary to go to the enterprise's strategy, understand its past and problems, and propose practical solutions to solve the problem, rather than the performance of technology products and digital product indicators.
From this perspective, a sound consulting and research process must be missing.
Like KPIs and OKRs, many times they overlap, but KPIs are for data metrics, while OKRs are for team goals, which look similar, and the core concepts are actually different.
The process of digitalization will not be smooth sailing, so the enterprise digitalization capabilities, more should take lessons from the four major, rather than the Internet company.
|0xFF Digital Talent Literacy
We often satirize some of the words used in the Internet: to open up, close the loop, grasp ...... But in the face of the complex objective world, these words still have its meaning. In the case of enterprise digitalization capabilities, for example, the axioms are all pragmatic, specific to each thing, it is necessary to unlimited to dig their own potential.
Remember a story: a new employee of the consulting company, to sell the program to the target customer, but the target customer's boss is very busy, so need to make their program in 1 minute to speak clearly. Finally, communicate with the boss of the target customer, in the elevator, a sentence clearly articulated their own program: according to my research, your company can enhance revenue by 30% in one year.
Details forgotten, but this highly abstract ability, or very much needed.
Then the digital talent "retreat" ability, what should have? Simply put, there are four points:
The first is the ability to visualize the abstract problem, for example, a customer asks you: about enterprise digitalization, what do you think we should do? This is a very open-ended question, yet it requires very specific instructions, so without prior research on the customer's industry, it is difficult to visualize the abstract question.
Secondly, the ability to see the essence of the phenomenon according to the phenomenon, such as the customer's enterprise so many departments, there are many conflicts of interest between each other, how to solve? This actually has to be considered from the perspective of the fight through, closed-loop, grips ...... to distill the essential problem, solve the essential problem in order to solve the customer problem.
Once again, the ability to think systematically about the problem, the real program, not necessarily how lofty, more is very trivial but specific details, then how to draw the structure like to put forward a systematic program, the study is the ability to systematize.
Finally, the ability to learn quickly, which is similar to the requirements of funds, investment banking and other industries, daily contact with the company will not be familiar to you, most of them are unfamiliar with the industry, such as the chemical industry, biology or aerospace. In the past, it was an era of "different industries", but nowadays, with the internet-based information and knowledge platforms, cross-disciplinary fast learning is actually possible.
Therefore, digital talent does not necessarily come from digital companies, because the only goal of the industry is to solve problems, so it is more reliable to get talent from consulting companies.
Sometimes, companies will have questions about digitalization: isn't it just a platform for bandwagons? Every now and then, digital is being questioned, but since the beginning, digital has been valued.
I have always believed that the data R&D position, roll to the end, the roll is the industry solutions, so outside the technology to understand more about the business issues, not only is it necessary, but also for the next two or three decades of career planning, help a lot.